Summary:
A man involved in the French Resistance to German occupation during the Second World War, Lieutenant Fontaine, is captured and imprisoned in Fort Montluc in Lyon.1 He carefully and meticulously plans his escape, seeing the achievement of each stage along his journey towards freedom as a personal victory. When Jost, a young teenage prisoner, arrives in his cell Fontaine is uncertain whether to trust him and take him with him as he tries to escape or to kill him in order that he cannot raise the alarm. He chooses to take him along and together they succeed in escaping.
Analysis:
It is often remarked that the title of this film gives the full story, and in a sense it does. It immediately takes us to the end of the film, sums up what has happened, and almost suggests the 98 minutes of screen time has essentially amounted to no more than, ‘a man escaped’. As an audience our usual expectations of mainstream narrative film are, therefore, straight away challenged. And yet, when we do reach the end of the film it is not a man but in fact two men that walk away from the prison having scaled the outer wall and neither of them could have achieved this without the help of the other – ‘Had I been alone I might still be there’, says our central character. Cinematically, this is certainly a defiant title in that Bresson seems to eschew mystery, suspense and surprise; we know what is going to happen. However, although he does put aside a particular storytelling type of mystery, the film actually remains highly enigmatic as the French title reveals. ‘Un condamné à mort s’est échappé’ suggests this is going to be a film not just about ‘a man’ who escapes but about ‘a man condemned to death’ who escapes; a man, therefore, who escapes death. Or, the French suggests, adding further mystery to enigma, we could adopt another alternative title, ‘Le vent souffle où il veut/The wind bloweth where it listeth’, which if we don’t recognise it for ourselves the film will later tell us, is a quote from the Bible giving Christ’s words to Nicodemus (John 3: 8), but which we might also add, sounds rather like a pretty conventional piece of proverbial folk-wisdom. And so, a little reflection on the title means things are beginning to seem rather more complex than Bresson’s initial claim, given before the credits, that, ‘This is a true story; I have told it as it happened, without embellishment’, would seem to suggest.2
The opening credits to the film are presented against the background of a wall, as is apt for a film that is going to focus on the idea of a man feeling trapped and wishing to escape. During the film it is not simply that we know through spending so long with him that Fontaine is held in a small cell, individual shots are frequently composed in order to place Fontaine in an enclosed space within the frame. When he is taken to be questioned, for example, he stands facing the camera but with the blank backs of two German interrogators to either side, so that he is confined in the central section of the shot. Often we see him through the doorway of his cell so that the wall of his cell and the door take up most of the frame and he is held within a much reduced vertical space, again, centre screen. When, a third of the way through the film, he manages to get out of his cell by removing a panel in his door, we have a shot from outside the cell as his face emerges through the door but is boxed centre screen in light that casts heavy shadows on his face. When he emerges through the skylight for the first time he is similarly ‘trapped’ but this time in a diagonal, letterbox-like, opening across the screen. Each movement towards freedom exists within continued entrapment.
When we first see Fontaine he is in the enclosed space of the back of a car being driven to prison. Immediately the tension between being in such a space and wishing to get out of it is conveyed as he tries to escape. But before this happens at the very beginning of the film there is what seems when we first watch the film to be a strange shot that focuses on his hands. Although we only see the hands, Fontaine seems to be turning them over and inspecting them. In the film we will continually return to his hands as he works at making a chisel from a spoon, at chipping away at a door, at levering panels of wood in a door, at making rope, at shaping pieces of metal into hooks, and at other tasks he gives himself. What we are being returned to time and again by Bresson is the idea of work, of not being idle. Hubrard says later in the film, ‘You must keep busy. Write to try to stay sane’.
We are immersed in Fontaine’s world. Throughout the film, our focus on him is intense and unrelenting. In the car during the opening sequence there are street sounds but they are made to seem distant, as if we are in Fontaine’s mind as he registers things around him and prepares to try to open the car door. Bresson allows nothing to detract from this focus on our central character. For example, the brutality of the German occupation is given but it is expressed through filmic understatement in order to ensure it does not come to occupy the foreground of the film for the viewer; the pistol-whipping Fontaine receives after attempting to escape from the car blurs into a dissolve of him getting out of the car at the prison, and later there is a brief glimpse of a guard picking up a wooden shovel handle to beat him before we cut to Fontaine being carried on a stretcher to his cell.
These sorts of brief visual glimpses not only invite the viewer to become their own storyteller, padding out the information they are being given through the use of their own imagination, but actually demand that the viewer should do so. Similarly, the dialogue is composed of short, sharp sentences that give the facts and leave room for the viewer’s imagination: “My cell barely measured three metres by two. I soon learnt to communicate with my neighbour. He was waiting to be shot any day now. He was 19 years old.”
Bresson’s key requirement of us is that we should imaginatively engage with Fontaine’s situation. We have to remain alert to clues, as Fontaine has to remain alert to possibilities of escape. When halfway through the film we see Fontaine watching a guard winding a mechanism on a wall, for example, we have to fill in for ourselves that this mechanism is connected to a skylight and that this could form the next stage in Fontaine’s escape; we have in other words to be in tune with Fontaine’s thought processes.
According to Paul Schrader (1972) quoted by Joseph Cunneen in Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film: “Bresson’s use of the everyday is not derived from a concern for ‘real-life’ but from an opposition to the contrived, dramatic events which pass for real-life in movies.” (in Cunneen 2003: 22) Cunneen himself suggests Bresson’s approach, forces the spectator to an extra alertness; it is almost as if we have to work out the specifics of the escape for ourselves, facing the same difficulties as Fontaine. (ibid: 61) In his Notes on Cinematography, Bresson gives the advice that the cinematographer should, “Accustom the public to divining the whole of which they are given only a part. Make people diviners. Make them desire it.” (Bresson 1977: 54)
If the playing of the Kyrie from Mozart’s Mass in C minor at the start of the film and the idea of an escape from death were not enough, the religious connotations of the film gradually become clearer.3 In a sense we have an extended meditation on predestination and free will. When the Pastor says, ‘Read and pray. God will save you’, Fontaine’s response is ‘He’ll only save us if we give him a hand’. This idea of man as capable of actively determining his own fate seems to be further reinforced when Fontaine discusses the position of the men in his prison block. ‘We were a hundred unfortunates awaiting our fate. I was under no illusion about my own’, he says. There is a slight pause and because we have come to see him as a condemned man we think we know what is coming next, we expect him to be fatalistic and accepting, but instead he surprises us concluding that his fate will be, ‘to escape’. Even this though does not bring us to a conclusion in the debate on predestination: does this confidence mean he simply ‘knows’ he is predestined to escape, or that he is predestined to escape because he retains this determination and continues to exert his freewill in moving towards his goal? Despite at times displaying this sort of certainty, at other times he is beset by doubts.
To begin with in his relationship with the person in the neighbouring cell, Blanchet, he is the one who offers help and reassurance; although he knows this also helps him (‘It’s a comfort to be looking out for others’, he tells Blanchet). But by the end it seems Blanchet has become the dominant party; they are in their cells next to each other, each speaking to the other without being seen by the other, and like a priest in a confessional box Blanchet says, ‘Have faith in your hooks and ropes and in yourself. You have doubts?’, and receives Fontaine’s response, ‘What’s hard is taking the plunge’.
Throughout the escape itself Fontaine continues to have doubts and uncertainties. ‘I had to act but I couldn’t’, he says at one point. The whole thing becomes a series of hesitations followed by sudden leaps of faith as he and Jost succeed in moving stage by stage towards the outer wall of the prison. Along the way Fontaine disturbingly takes on the role of a God-like arbitrator of life and death. Looking down from the height of the roof to a guard patrolling below and effectively standing between the would-be escapees and their goal, he decides, ‘This man had to die’. Perhaps, therefore, in more ways than one it is fitting that the film ends with the two men walking to freedom to the sound of the opening to Mozart’s Mass, since in the order of service the Kyrie eleison (‘Lord, have mercy’) follows the confession of sins.
John White
Notes
1. Lyons, the third largest city in France, was a key centre for the French Resistance, or Maquis, within Vichy France during the Second World War.
2. The way in which Bresson’s ‘soundscape’ embellishes the story and creates meaning would form a whole study in itself, as might elements of homage such as that to Jean Vigo’s Zero de Conduite (1933) as Fontaine and Jost scramble across the prison roof towards the end of the film.
3. Is it too much to suggest the series of shots through the film of Fontaine looking up towards the ceiling of his cell, towards the skylight and towards Jost on the roof above him carries some reference in Bresson’s mind to Psalm 121 (‘I will lift up mine eyes’)?
Cast and Crew:
[Country: France. Production company: Gaumont and Nouvelles Éditions de Films (NEF). Director and Screenwriter: Robert Bresson. Cinematographer: Léonce-Henri Burel. Editor: Raymond Lamy. Cast: Francois Leterrier (Fontaine), Charles Le Clainche (Jost), Roland Monod (Le Pasteur), Maurice Beerblock (Blanchet), Jacques Ertaud (Orsini), Jean-Paul Delhumeau (Hebrard), Roger Treherne (Terry).]
Further Reading:
Robert Bresson, Notes on Cinematography, trans. Jonathan Griffin, New York: Urizen Books, 1977.
Bert Cardullo (ed.), The Films of Robert Bresson: A Casebook, London: Anthem Press, 2009.
Joseph Cunneen, Robert Bresson: A Spiritual Style in Film, London and New York, Continuum, 2003.
Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1972.
Brian Price, Neither God nor Master: Robert Bresson and Radical Politics, Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.